If we are to look beyond the perimeters of a lifetime, we can discern the generations, the ones who came before us and those who will grow old after we are gone. We feel a sense of ownership over the two hundred years or so that surround each of us in myth and story and hope. Reaching back, we can envision our grandparents’ youth, disbelieving the idea that these strange wrinkled creatures once had great posture, young desires and regrets. Bringing our noses to the horizon, we can see ourselves wilt, bend over in scoliosis to hear the cry of a child who has our eyes or smile, who has taken our name as last or middle. We know, or else deny, the arid reality of their future.
We are adept at seeing this vision of time, we know how to speed it up, see the narrative of expansion and decline, place ourselves at the climax. We can see the whole operatic story—but what if we were to look further, though centuries? If we rose above to see below, as a child might climb up a tall pine to behold the vastness of a valley? If we zoomed out until the fall of the Roman Empire became as inconsequential as an ant nest collapsing—if we go further again, compress the eons into the same time lapse—if we enter deep time, where we can see earth move, understand its movements not as ancient grumbling, but as constant flow, a molten rock forming and cooling to come alive. From here we can see the whole of human history, coming and going, as nothing.
To the earth, ten thousand years happened all at once: man stepped foot out of the cave at the same time he placed one on the moon; as our ancestors moved across the continents, we were moving across the skies in metal shells; as man invented tools, so too the lightbulb, penicillin, the iPhone, greed, forgiveness, the dewy decimal system.
To the earth, all humanity will be seen in a layer of the earth that will settle in a sediment, a slice of cruel history to be looked back on as a dog does a nasty bout of fleas, or as one recalls a tumultuous summer romance.
In the southeast of Australia, where the seeds of this story have been sown, or where the land will be carried off across the equator, buried undersea, compressed into mountains, our fossilised layer will surely tell one story over and over, that of ash and soot, fire and rebirth, creatures and plants burnt and encrusted in stone, people miraculous in the story of flames that opened up and ripped across the land, fists of fires burning like celebrations though epoch, huzzah, huzzah, huzzah.
Lexi Bostik’s areolas were actually the size of apples. You could see them if you squinted in the photo. Fourteen-year-old Lexi, on the shoulders of a man more than a decade older than her. At the time he seemed to her an adult, a conscientious objector to a war he was forced to fight—but these were old feelings. All she remembered of him now was that his left pupil had looked as if someone had dragged a paintbrush through it, blue iris smeared, a comet burning toward his nose. And that he was a pervert, or he must have been, from the evidence at hand: the way he grabbed her thigh; his apparent eagerness to hoist her up there. Why had she been up there anyway? She surely didn’t volunteer. For all the consequences it had in her life, Lexi did not have a neat story, nothing worthy of a press release, to explain the photo. She barely remembered the day. And among her recollections she was wrong about at least one thing: it was his right eye with the scar. The picture had a small defect, a fleck on his left eye, the scar itself erased in grainy film.
The sign she held: Trees Not Violence. In the picture, a crowd of hippies walked down a slight incline. They were in a forest, approaching a bulldozer. Some played guitars, others sang and clapped, but she—perhaps because of her slight, pubescent frame—had been raised above them all, and it was she to whom the eye was drawn. The halter top she wore in leu of a bra was tucked into her jeans and, arms outstretched, her breasts lifted up to escape their flimsy fabric prison.
In the colourised version of the picture, which had appeared to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the event, one could make out the rim of her areolas more clearly, three shades darker than her skin. With the wide distribution of the original photo and the years of seeing it, her memory and dreams of that time had come to be superimposed in monochrome, but here in her hands was proof of the colours of it. Grainy greens and browns resurrected from the dead, blue leaves of eucalypt extended as skeletal fingers.
Young Lexi’s hair fell to her tailbone in steady waves, as it did again now, although it was no longer a solid black but speckled with grey. In the last two years the grey had refused to confine itself to her crown, as it had since it first appeared in the ’90s, when two straps of her hair had bleached in grief and stayed that way. The streaks lent her a gravitas that, with her beauty, she may not have otherwise been afforded.
Since her retirement though, Lexi’s hair had rapidly threaded itself in the glisten of silver. It happened like flood gates opening, as if in her resignation her hair, too, had given up, or else released something it had been holding in for years. The grey hair at her crown was now going white, and she could see already that she would relive this moment, of her hair colouring all at once, again—a second bleaching—sometime when she was older. When she had given up something as she had now given up on other things she had never thought herself capable of giving up on.
Her vanity, perhaps.
Looking at the photo now, she felt just as she had when she had first looked at it, and the many times since—she did not know if she wanted to rip it up or frame it, so she settled again for the compromise and shoved it between books and folders on her desk.
In the lounge she did her morning calisthenics. Facing toward the open window where a magpie she fed each afternoon called out to her in greeting, she inhaled deeply as the wind came through, carrying in the smell of the jasmine that fortified her home.
When had her morning stretches become calisthenics? When she had become old, she supposed, which had happened to her rudely, with her greying hair, a decade or so after she was told it would. That women over forty were invisible had been a universal truth she had herself touted to prove a point, seek an injustice. In return, she had often been met with raised eyebrows. Now, in her mid-fifties she was not—as anyone could see—invisible, and perhaps never would be. When she had still been working, she’d prided herself on matching the fitness of the twenty-year-olds in her office; in fact she was often fitter than them. Once, she had asked a girl to help her move an oak desk from one side of the office to the other. Every four feet or so she had to stop, lower the great thing to the ground, waiting, her breathing unimpeded, while the young woman bent in half, her cheeks flushed, catching her breath.
Lexi had never thought she was invincible, but she had spent her life working to be that way.
After the stretches, the lotions: balms, oils, sunscreen, one of two daily rituals initiated decades before skincare had become the mega conglomerate it was now, filled with complicated twelve-step instructions and, Lexi suspected, too many crystals. Sitting on the ottoman in front of her bedroom vanity, she smeared on the same brand of sunscreen she had used since 1985. White tub with baroque blue writing. Perhaps it contained microplastics, some horrendous chemical, but when it came to her face and hands, Lexi did not care. She used to make small justifications for herself, buying products as rewards for her services to the earth: anti-aging serum if she raised money to save threatened bushland; magic eye cream for an endangered quoll; Botox if she contributed to a successful lawsuit against polluters. Surely no one, she thought, would begrudge her these small hypocrisies. Was she not entitled to treat herself for her accomplishments every now and again? Surely her credits outweighed her debits? Now, though, she knew the truth of it—herself—better. What preserved her could liquify starfish, as far as she was concerned.
She applied the products in the same pattern as always. Ten dots, evenly spaced like she was preparing to be filmed for motion capture animation. Rubbing her slim fingers together to coat them in the excess product, then massaging, upward from the neck, upwards again from the cheeks, back around down her elegantly protuberant nose. Deep breathing. Expelling all the air in her lungs and then filling them again.
Retirement was freeing. So she had been told, so she had to tell herself. Freeing, she repeated to herself as she rubbed coconut oil into her palms, smelling her hands before rubbing it on her neck. Freeing.
Then why did she feel as if the cage bars had been lowered?
Lexi bought a coffee from the café she visited every morning before her walk. She exited the café, then about faced and returned to the counter when her banking app notified her she’d just spent forty-five dollars on a single cup.
‘Excuse me, you just charged me forty-five dollars for a coffee.’
‘Oh, what did you buy?’ The teenage café attendant blinked at her. Another thing about Lexi: she would never let a young person condescend to her about technology. Maybe, Lexi supposed, she was in her early twenties, she could never tell these days. It was fashionable at the time to have two long strands of fringe bleached, and Lexi felt indignant at this young woman, as if she was being mocked, or like the young woman had tried to steal something she was not, at her age, entitled too.
‘I was in here fifteen seconds ago.’
The young woman blinked again and looked around as if it were Lexi who was being unreasonable. Lexi could not decide if this girl was hungover or just an idiot.
‘I bought a coffee.’
‘Oh, coffee is four fifty.’
An idiot, then. Lexi inhaled through her nose. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know. I was just in here, I bought a coffee off you, the coffee is four dollars fifty, you charged me forty-five dollars.’
A queue had started to form behind her. The attendant looked harassed, patrons were starting to fuss. Lexi showed the girl her banking app. She explained the situation again, her voice becoming terse, and then a manager or supervisor approached from behind a shawl of beads that clattered like chicken scratching. There was the faint sour whiff of a kitchen sink. The manger was wearing suspenders, a piercing through his lip and had a haircut that would have been stylish a decade ago. In a way that made it seem like the characteristic of a tick, he jerked his neck aside to flick his fringe out of his eyes. Lexi would not have trusted him to supervise a hamster.
‘Is everything alright here?’
‘No,’ Lexi said, ‘it is not alright.’ She explained her situation for the third time, now with no pretence of politeness. She did not particularly care if she sounded like what she was, a middle-aged women—a woman, in fact, exceeding the outer limits of her middle age—complaining. ‘I come in here every day,’ she said.
The manager eyed her, grabbed a machine, excused himself.
‘Where is he going?’
‘They are going out to check the receipts.’
‘Christ,’ said Lexi. ‘Well when they,’ Lexi said, using the same pompous intonation as the girl, ‘come back, can you let them know I’ll be over there.’ She pointed to a corner, where she then walked, inspecting plants along the wall. As she got closer, she realised they were fake, although the makers had bothered to include a blemish on an ivy leaf, a yellow tint of faux sunburn.
The manager approached her with a look of regret.
‘So sorry, sorry for that. Can we offer you a breakfast and a voucher?’
‘You can offer me my money back,’ Lexi said.
‘Right, okay.’
A hot flush of anger surged through her. The manager became distant at once and went to get the machine, performing the necessary magic to reverse the charges. The sun outside passed out from behind a cloud, filling the place with dappled light. The plants, now lit up, took on an obvious waxy consistency, looked too bright compared to the flora in images of which they were constructed. The heat, Lexi conceded, might be the menopause.
She leaned over the counter and tapped her card. ‘I come here every day,’ Lexi said again.
‘Right,’ they said.
Lexi made eye contact first with the manager, then with the young woman, took a biscuit from the countertop, and left.
Was it possible to get sick of a river? Lexi had not thought it possible to get sick of anything in nature, had believed, for most of her life, that nature exuded a divine feminine energy that only those truly in tune with the landscape could experience—even if she had been shrewd enough to keep this information to herself after her university days. But there she was, exasperated at the thought of the river unfurling itself before her, same curves and bends as always.
Lately, the prospect that the earth may not be a divine and benevolent mother—carer of all creatures great and small—but rather, like her, an old and tired bitch, had not escaped her.
Down the street from the café, when a homeless man had asked for change, she’d offloaded the biscuit to him. He took it, looking tired.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they taste horrendous.’
He sighed and bit into it.
Annoying, about the café. The coffee was decent, closest to the path she took through the winding river of the Yarra. The urge to lecture the young café workers had not quite passed, engulfed her ability to look outward. You would have nothing, she wanted to say, without us. Did no one have respect for their elders anymore? For queer lineage. Where on earth were their manners? Did they not understand the privilege, the flagrant appropriation, involved in it all? If the lot of them had come of age in the ’70s they would have married someone of the opposite sex and had children. If they thought about gays and lesbians at all, it would be with a strain of vitriolic homophobia—patronising sympathy at best.
Now everyone was a genderqueer bisexual. Christ. A sip of hot coffee, taken in too great a volume, burnt the roof of Lexi’s mouth. Or they would be, Lexi thought, until a more appealing fad came along.
If Sidney were with her she would have asked Lexi what the point of all that struggle was if the generations who came after hers could not enjoy a life learning to explore their gender and sexuality in a way Lexi’s generation couldn’t. How, she would intone, could we expect progress if we assigned such arbitrary constraints to gender like anger and pain, if one gender was always defined by the other. Wouldn’t it make sense that people want something looser? After all, Sidney would say, it might simply be that a lot of people are, well, genderqueer bisexuals.
It was a speech Lexi had heard may times. Something with the power to cool her, soften her position. If it didn’t change her mind, it would at least stretch it, pull at the elastic enough to let her pass another couple of weeks, another couple of months, in the office, keeping her mouth shut when the HR girl insisted on a pronoun circle before a meeting, before the stresses of the job snapped her back into shape. It was a speech worthy of Ruth. When had she started conflating the two, Sidney and Ruth? She had not done this with Sang, or even Frieda, although they too had been too sensitive for the living. When the discourse had overtaken even her imagined Ruth’s open-mindedness, she supposed. Although Ruth’s kindness had been more endless than Sidney’s, more troubling. Ruth’s core belief that everything living thing, great and small, was one of God’s creatures had eroded the boundaries between herself and others; she would let herself expand with others’ grief, unaware, sometimes, that she was instead filling with toxic gas.
Sidney had been less prone to this—she would feel oppressed but not enveloped by the pain that leaked out of others. Her flights of kindness were always readjusted, with a little comment, an eyeroll. As if she had forgotten herself, let a soft underbelly show that then needed to be covered. She would defend someone’s gender identity and then add: ‘My god, did you see their pants, though? Three hundred dollars, if you can believe it.’ Sidney’s own sensitivity and her urge to call out hypocrisies—her urge to be a bitch—were like two opposing magnets that she had to keep in line, or risk lurching in an exstistentional zigzag, one way then the next.
Lexi thought about how the young café worker would recount this interaction to their friends, exaggerating her tone, perhaps, and after a pint or two at the pub they might add an unfavourable haircut, playing it up as if something almost traumatic had happened to them. I’ll talk to you about trauma, Lexi thought. Her mother had stopped speaking to her in the ’80s. Rape and death threats were old hat. She had been shunned by the vast majority of her community, banished from the castle that she had built.
Overcome with bitterness and thinking to herself of the inconvenience of finding another regular café, Lexi realised she didn’t have to. Soon she would leave. The relief was bodily, took her out of her mind and launched her into her surroundings. So, this was retirement.
She breathed in the fecund smells of the river, the damp wet of the ferns on the bank, the tang of salt in the air, and felt a wave of calmness settle over her. Unconsciously her posture straightened. In a few days, she would leave to look at some of the properties she her eye on. One in Gippsland and one in Blue Mountains, then she would loop back and make the journey to Tasmania—the place she knew she should, if she had half a brain, go. The place where she could live out the rest of her life, and not, among the dense bush of that vast island, worry about preserving it—knowing that its lush wilderness would avoid the worst extremities until well after she was gone.
In this pocket of paradise, she imagined she could live on, content not to think about the earth after the fact of her own skeleton. But the thought of abandoning the mainland, isolating herself in that foreign place—cutting off possibilities—filled her with an icy terror of anxiety. For a while she had thought of moving further north, further away from it all, up to Byron Bay, not far from where the photograph had been taken. The photograph of young her, with beautiful bouncing tits. Gravitationally immune tits.
In the end, though, she had come to her senses. No matter the kinship she felt with the place, the prospect of going so far north—to parts of the country where it was already difficult to live through summer—asserted its absurdness.
A young woman in neon green jogged past, and Lexi felt no shame in admiring a body in such excellent form; in fact she felt a proud sense of entitlement. The call of a kingfisher sounded, and Lexi paused to look up, seeing if she could spot him.
The thing about the photo was that it was false, in a way. A lie. The photo had come to represent the entire protest, which had been one of the first of its kind in Australia. The hippies had congregated there, at the end of their own era, when the match hovering over the gas can of the neoliberal ’80s had been struck. The photo had captured some of the crowd that had turned up in September and stayed—all dirt and feelings of camaraderie—some all the way through August to protest the development of the creek. Of the hundreds of photos taken that day, the day of culmination and arrests, it was that one, with Lexi at the focal point, that was reprinted in newspapers, that was circulated in the media, embedded into the cultural consciousness.
But Lexi’s devoutness to that cause was the lie. The truth was that Lexi had stayed just two nights, which happened to coincide with the climax. Where others had camped for weeks already, were worn down over the run-ins with police and loggers, beginning to feel hopeless and burnt out, she had merely gone up for the weekend, defying her mother. When the protest had begun to gain momentum in the press, she’d caught the sleeper from Melbourne to Sydney, then got a ride from a friend’s older sister, up along the coast all the way to Lismore, before hitchhiking to the creek. Even then, Lexi gave off the impression of strength compacted—laundry detergent concentrate. And so she was convinced, full of passion for the earth and people’s ability to heal it, that a week or so of peacefully protesting, perhaps symbolically chaining herself to a tree, would do the job. That—although she could not have articulated it—the mere presence of her, Lexi, and her unbridled love for mother earth, for women, would be enough to save everything. She was ignorant of the struggle that had preceded this moment—the pure length and depth of it. To Lexi, the struggle was about the creek, as if it were the first place on earth to be damaged in flagrant disregard of those who were its original custodians, were still its custodians. She had no real concept of the struggle that had been fought since colonisation, and instead saw only the creek, and herself, as uniquely hard done by.
She had not been prepared for the brutality of the day. For what would happen when the protest, already significantly delaying the development, came to a head. She had stood back with others, children and pregnant women, holding signs and chanting, and had retreated again to an even safer distance in the violence of arrests. In the aftermath of that day she had wanted only to leave, the actual size of her, body and soul, minuscule, fully felt. The accomplishment of what they had set out to do didn’t come until much later, until the people who stayed on were finally successful. For Lexi, the revelation came when she had started to see herself, replicated, the anger and pride she carried in her expression, atop the shoulders of a man with a wounded eye, and she saw with it a new type of purpose—the vision of her life, its possibilities, enlarged.
The photo still carried a certain currency. To a younger generation, it stood incorrectly as an emblem of the decades that proceeded the protest, of a certain type of tree hugger—make love not war; all you need is love—but to those in the environmental movement, it stood for the power of direct action to halt big business, to pass legislation. It stood for the power of the people.
It stood, so thought Lexi now, for wishful thinking.
Catching a lift back through New South Wales that day, she had thought herself exhausted, thought she might have glimpsed the feeling of defeat that she had suffered similarly to those who had stayed on, who would go on to weather it until the end. Adorable. Young Alexis, thought Lexi now, knew nothing about what thirty years of Sisyphean battle can do to you.
She rose her head to watch birds flitter from tree to tree. No kingfisher, but there was a red-rumped parrot, honeyeaters, the obnoxiousness of two rainbow lorikeets, carrying on like drunk university boys.
You just didn’t get the same verdicts now, Lexi thought. Or even if you did, it would all be turned over in the dull trap of bureaucracy. Months of protesting did nothing to sway governments from the influence of big coal, big business, who in turn controlled the narrative. Years of work could be thrown away with a quiet law being passed in an empty room. Idiotic men ruled countries in the ways of bullies denied lunch money from their prey. Things were not the same.
Now all that remained of the day was that picture and the feelings the trees had given her, the stillness of mind induced by being in nature. Lexi caught a whiff of it here, the positive charge of the water, the dampness, the earth, the feeling of being at home in her body, and reprimanded herself again for her childish attitude toward the river earlier. Every day she did this and never learnt, dreaded her walk, and then was thankful for it. Confronting and then overcoming the same problem. Would get worked up and cool down. Fire extinguished in a bucket of water.
The river moved beside her. In gentle, still tide the ripples moved in slow motion, braiding like molasses.
At the pool: the steady laps, the consistency of strokes, and breathe, one, two, three, four, breathe, one, two, three, four. The undulating refractions of the waves on the pool bottom, distorting her shadow into miasma, moving through the lanes, all of it growing bright and then disappearing as the clouds above revealed and occluded the sun.
Swimming, like walking, had always been useful to Lexi. There were times she had left the office in the middle of the day, a problem on her mind—where to direct funds when both options were equally urgent, whether to pursue a donation or source of income that had ethical implications—and gone to the pool. She’d dive in from the block at the deep end, swim for forty-five minutes while she mulled the problem over as the water did her, and when she emerged she’d have a solution—that, or she would understand, with finality, that a resolution was not possible, that a project would have to be scrapped, another path taken. Now, though, the rhythms of the pool had the simple mechanism of breaking up her day, distracting her from the gnawing length of it.
As mantra, Lexi believed boredom was not a reality to a cultured person; the ability to always occupy herself had been a source of pride. But now when she finally had the time to herself—to go to a restaurant she wanted to try before she left, to attended a gallery, a play, to catch up on the publications and books that had been piling up in her house—she felt the stark reality of entire days with no structure, with nothing she could fix, make better, with no practical solutions she could enforce upon the world, and was left dumb-founded and restless. She often felt something enter her mind only to waft out a second later, replaced by something unrelated. She picked things up and put them down, walked into rooms only to forget her initial purpose. The seemingly small task of leaving the house became almost impossible. She was unable to concentrate on words or paintings and became horrified at the prospect of sitting still in a dark theatre for two hours.
And she was horrified too, it had occurred to her, of running into people she knew, people who had distanced themselves, who had sent overly polite emails, informing her of their intention to break ties with her, who would be taking their donations elsewhere, of seeing her colleagues at the university who, when she had enquired about the guest lectures she had been giving regularly since 2003, had told her the course had been rearranged, didn’t she hear? These were people she had known for years, who she had counted as friends. And most of them, she knew now, were fucking cowards. Only a handful of them had reached out to say they supported her, and none of them had done so publicly. Although a few people she knew had gone out of their way to publicly condemn her. Some offering their own two cents. I have known Alexis for years and, if I’m honest, this comes as no surprise. As if they hadn’t had her over for dinner and complained about, among other things, the lack of nuance in internet discourse, as if it were only young people, and not themselves, who were to blame. These were people who liked to conceptualise themselves as wanting change, but when it came down to it all they had to truly reckon with was their own moral cowardice. The really spineless ones had retweeted that stupid girl with no comment, then stopped speaking to Lexi altogether—wanting only to protect their little lives, to curl up in a shell without drawing attention to themselves, and roll away.
Lexi was not worried about what they would say or not say to her. The polite condescending smile they would offer, the excuses they would make to leave, the self-righteous speeches they might give her. No, she was not scared of them. She was afraid, instead, of her own vitriol. Of the things she could, would, say in return. Of the hole she would dig herself.
And maybe a small part of her wanted it, to take this thing inside her that had been sitting on hot coals, hold it to someone else’s neck, and brand them with it.
Lexi stopped at the shallow end, rested her head against the rim of the pool. Small children shrieked from the leisure lane, two teenage boys said vile things about the lifeguard pacing back and forth fiddling with the whistle at her mouth. The cloud extinguished the sun once more, dimming the scene around her as if foreshadowing the events in a horror movie. Lexi pushed off into backstroke. She took big breaths, inhale, one two three four, exhale.
The reason she was so restless, she knew, was that she had stayed in Melbourne, lingered, in the aftermath of her own sentence. She had drawn out her own forced retirement, been in denial about the finality of it. Initially, she’d stood back from the organisation to help from the sidelines. She’d passed over big decisions to Harper and had gone her own way. She helped a woman in rural Victoria gather information on a chemical leak that had poisoned the water source in her town, she helped an elderly citizen—a man who spoke English as a second language and had been diagnosed with black lung—to write letters to the the coal mining company whose uncontrolled fire years before had covered his property in dark clouds, the ash that wept from them settling on his rooftop like cursed snow. Lexi had been particularly invested in raising bail for two young Indigenous men, Jamie and a man who called himself O, but whose legal name was Tyson, who looked to be embalmed in a lengthy court battle on eco terrorism charges. Neither had wanted to talk. Jamie feared retribution on his family, who had lived near the site for generations, and was anxious that he had undone what small amount of progress elders had made for land protection in the area. Rightfully anxious—Lexi in fact knew and was fond of Jamie’s uncle, Pete. A short man with a huge voice, Pete liked to wear violently colourful Hawaiian shirts and tell people to stop taking the fucken piss. She had worked with him before to negotiate between green groups and the local mob—by no means a smooth process. The disappointment of his Uncle Pete, Lexi knew, could be devastating. It was not clear what exactly Tyson feared, his own life was certainly not it. In his pale remaining eye, the small half smile on his face and the looseness of his posture, he carried with him the deranged air of someone who had already sacrificed himself for what he believed in, as cult members do for their leaders. Lexi had met many people like him before, people who had forfeited a go at a normal life. They were often a liability. They could not be trusted to stay calm while a cop frisked them, asked them the same question five hundred times, they did not know how to make nice with authority, but they were also essential, Lexi knew. They were part of the chain. You needed lunatics to stand in front of trucks. And she came to understand that it was not fear in Tyson’s silence, but a sort of resignation. He wanted it over and done with, he wanted to serve his sentence and get out.
The facts about what happened to Tyson and Jamie had taken months to uncover, exasperating the lawyer more than Lexi, but when it had come out it had come out all at once. The illegal interrogation by two guards who’d caught them trying to damage a water pump that was siphoning megalitres of water from the Murray Darling. The beating. The promise that they wouldn’t be charged if they left and never came back, then the charges, four months later—allegedly the time it had taken the company to identify the two assailants, but more practically the time it takes deep bruises and open wounds to heal.
She had thought the case would keep her occupied, push back the end of her working life one more month, one more day. Or perhaps she had been delusional, thought that after time away from the organisation focusing on bringing those blatantly corrupt cotton farming fuckers to their knees, she could return to work. But as soon as it was clear that the two men had extensive documentation of the assault, time stamps and the names of who was responsible, the charges were dropped and everyone moved on: Jamie was getting married, wanted to focus on peaceful, if not entirely legal, action within his own community; Tyson was going to northern Queensland, heading for the dredging of the Great Barrier Reef, coal mines blowing up sacred sites, Adani—he had options—no doubt to get himself another court case that would not be so easily dismissed. The older man with black lung had at last been given a hefty out-of-court settlement, and then the woman with the poisoned water, active herself on Twitter, caught wind of the shitstorm eating Lexi alive and wanted nothing to do with her.
Lexi’s organisation dissolved.
Lexi in the pool turned over, pushed harder into the rhythm of her freestyle, into the contours of her anger, feeling the strain in her shoulders.
Now there was just herself and the hours of any given day.
But she had stuck around to hover over things, she thought for a while she would move further up the Yarra, semi-rural, perhaps buy a house with views of the river, near Marion and Ted, where she could come into the city when she wanted to, maybe start something else, more low-key. She would concentrate on saving a single bird or frog, getting honeyeater numbers to a record high, helping the green tree frog make a comeback. But this was delusion. Lexi understood now she could not live here, not really live, she could only go on enacting a somnambulant theatre of life, going through the motions.
And what did it matter if a species was kept on life support for a few more years; at this point euthanasia was surely more compassionate.
No. Lexi, had to break away from it entirely. And if it were exile she’d been sentenced too, she would take it with magnanimity.
Lexi at last ducked under her lane divider and swam to the ladder, pulling herself out of the pool, the anger of her day worked out through the motions of her body, left in the clear chlorinated water, a fire put out, steaming to calm. And maybe, Lexi thought, one day she would melt with it, like the old witch she was.
Marion, good Marion, handing her a glass as soon as she walked in her door. She was wearing some ridiculous green dress that defied analysis. Her own design, Lexi had no doubt. Saturday evening, Lexi had taken the trip, as she did every month or so, to visit her dearest friends. Now, perhaps—the thought had occurred to her—her only friends. This visit, being the last of its kind before her intended move, was special, the wine Lexi held even more expensive than usual.
‘I’m cooking fish,’ Marion said, kissing her on both cheeks.
‘I can smell, delicious. Where’s Ted?’ Lexi asked, because he had not followed his wife to knock cheeks with Lexi as he normally would, asking her, with a straight face and dry tone, if they’d managed to burn her at the stake yet, a perennial question to which Lexi would answer with an amused little smile: ‘Hardly even tickled this time.’
Lexi took a sip of the wine and felt the sting of her saliva glands, satisfying.
Marion from the kitchen called: ‘He’s glued to the television, haven’t you seen? I hope you’re not still going up there.’
While Marion said this Lexi took her overnight bag to their spare room, admiring, as she always did, the patchwork of the stone walls, the view of the trees from the great bay windows. A small gecko, on the upper corner of the roof, scurried along and then stopped still, blue organs exposed through translucent skin.
‘Up where?’ Lexi called out, walking back through the house. ‘Of course I am. Why? What’s happened? Is Lucas around?’
But Lexi never did find out the whereabouts of her friends’ teenage son, because as she strode into the living room, she saw Ted sitting on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees. He had a glass not of wine, but whiskey. When Lexi came in he didn’t rise to greet her, but rubbed his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes, liberating his glasses from the bridge of his nose. To the left, the lounge opened up to the greenery of bush, a curl of the river discernible down the slope of their wild backyard. Birds, still mourning the end of twilight, restless in the trees. On the television, there was not the usual bouncing logo of the music station, ping-ponging tightly on each side of the screen corner, but the news. In mid-spring of 2019, fire season had turned apocalyptic.
A wall of orange, rippling and cracking. The heat so apparent it felt to Lexi as if flames might begin to lick out of the screen, melting the edges of television until the box collapsed in on itself.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Lexi said. She had missed the news that day. How had she missed the news? She never missed the news, but now the news was here, burning though every channel.
Images of the raging heat of it, bushland up in flame, firefighters looking like they were battling Greek myths. Soot on the face of people who fled their homes, unsure of the fate of dogs, horses, their neighbours. The stunned silence of residents who had not been allowed to stop long enough to let grief ripple through them.
Lexi went to take a drink, but realised she’d abandoned her wine in the spare room. Ted poured her a whiskey.
She took it without thanking him, and the two of them turned toward the television and stayed that way. Marion joined them, more whiskey was poured, the food, burnt in the distraction, abandoned. They remained there, the three of them, well after they would usually have retired to bed, thinking, perhaps, of their past shared life at The Homestead, of the stretch of land they had lived on, the fate of it, how vulnerable the bush looked at the mercy of the fire. Maybe they felt the cool air of the evening, the sheer space of oxygen between them and the trees, the silent threat of it. Or maybe they thought of nothing at all, looking into the screen as if it were a portal to some other universe, flames reflected in glasses, in the slickness of their eyes.
Here is fire: the ember of a cigarette that bites your fingers, makes them sting even while you suck them to relieve the pain as you stamp out the butt. It is warmth on a cold night. There it is in the sound of a fire engine wailing past, the absence, then the hint, of smoke, the question—can you smell burning? It is the sound of a crowded backyard, a log heaped into the raging bonfire. The melting of marshmallow, the burnt mouth, the desperate stoking of the last log in ash. It is a plume rising in the horizon. A pile of dry leaves that catch and rip upwards into flames, coming down like rain in hell, the burning remnants of each leaf threatening new sparks as they settle over dry land. It is a paddock marked and back-burned, the crackling of yellow grass, the worried look from the drivers of cars passing as the flames lick at the black bitumen of the country road. It is a city dweller, who has only seen bushfires on the news, heard the tone of consternation from a reporter, looking down from a plane window, seeing plumes raging through trees as if sprinting, the sheer speed and scope and smoke of it. Fire is much needed warmth in stiff frozen fingers. Fire is the seeds of the bush cracking open, giving life to the eucalypt that has evolved to depend on scorching. Fire is life extinguished from and breathed into the landscape. Fire brings death, and renewal.
Trees rushed past the window, a blur of brown and green pretending all is well in the light of dawn. Lexi had not returned home but set off toward Gippsland, as she’d planned to. She had not said good morning or goodbye to Marion and Ted, staying over breakfast to talk through the politics and reminisce in a removed ironic tone. Instead she’d rinsed out the wineglass left in her room, then snuck out like a young woman the morning after, her shoes in her hands as she tip-toed over the timber, closing the front door quietly behind her. Her face pulled in tension as her feet crunched through the pebbles of the pathway, toes getting caught in the weeds that had sprouted between the rocks, avoiding the smears of green gecko muck mushed between them. Lexi had sighed at the seeds of possum shit sprayed on her windshield that reliably fell on her car when she parked under the fig tree. Doing her best to wipe them off, she had put on her shoes on and started her journey.
It had not occurred to Lexi to put on the radio, a podcast, or even music, and so she drove in silence. On the seat beside her was the mail she’d grabbed on her way out yesterday afternoon, fanned out. Junk and appeals to donate to various charities, no doubt. There was also, although she’d not seen it yet, a letter, handwritten in familiar jagged cursive. If she had seen it yesterday she would have let herself back into the house, found the ornamental wooden box in the lounge, unclasped the metal hook, and placed the letter on top of the stack of identical ones, as if she were keeping sweet nothings from a lover. They were not from a lover, of course, although they contained something resembling the passion of one, curdled to vitriol.
The letters had started arriving in the late nineties, all with the same sentiment, although she could no longer be certain of that; Lexi had stopped opening them years ago. There was no real need to read them: the message had been pretty repetitive in pinning Lexi as the embodiment of Satan, bringer of the end times and etcetera. The first time Lexi had opened one of the letters, expecting a note from someone from the commune—Natalie perhaps—or even an attempt at reconciliation from her mother, she had been deceived by the overly polite salutation, Dear Alexis, before she read through the first paragraph and began shaking.
How ignorant she’d been of the hate toward her that existed in the world; she had not realised that someone could loathe her with such energy as she quietly went about her business. The violence of it had almost made her throw up, made her doubt herself in a way she hadn’t since the months after Ruth’s death, when her sense of self had not quite disappeared, but liquefied into a substance she felt unqualified to contain, like her soul was sloshing around in her stomach. Lexi began to wonder if she’d gone down the right path, if she had the nerve for what was ahead.
She’d barely recovered from this lapse when the second letter arrived, with more unending hate—no Dear Alexis this time—a continuation of the thoughts of the last one. They soon began to arrive regularly, each one shocking her less and less, until they evoked no more than the feeling a bill would—something she was aware was coming every few months and had prepared herself for in advanced, induced in her no more than a bitter laugh. She had continued to read them in fits of self-destruction, those first few years, drawn to them as gambling addicts are drawn to the light of casinos.
The letters had done one positive thing: prepared her for the internet trolls before internet trolls existed. Sometimes, when she looked at the comments that had accrued on her tweets, at the death and rape threats emailed to her work, she couldn’t help viewing the internet hate with a sweet condescension, the way an elephant might enjoy a toddler at the zoo having a tantrum—it was cute, in a way. It was the crassness of the trolls that made them seem silly, harmless even. The anonymous writer was never so vile—and this, somehow, had made it worse.
Outside the car the sunrise had come and shaded the sky in apricots, corals and peaches, the glint of the sun rising above the escarpments in the far distance. Was it just the peculiarity of the clouds, or was it smoke that caused the pretty colours to rupture so far across the horizon?
In 2014, Lexi had moved house and the letters had stopped. During the intervening years, she’d let the letters slip her mind until one day, when organising her office, she found the box. Flicking through the unread letters, she opened one at random. While she read through the slander, the treatise on how she would burn and rot in hell, she felt a strange pang and wondered if the old man—for she was certain the letter writer was an old man—had passed. Lexi realised the sensation as one she was familiar with, the sinewy pull of grief, and baulked. Despite herself, she had a small moment of silence for him. It had been for naught though. In 2017, among a wave of vitriol that could put even the old man’s letters to shame, someone—a traitor from the office, no doubt—had doxed her and three more handwriten letters had appeared at once, keen to make up for the years of peace she’d been allowed. The box had been taken down from the attic, the cream of the new letters placed atop the eggshell of the old.
But right then in the car, Lexi hadn’t seen the letter and this was not what she was thinking of. She was concerned instead about the drive ahead of her, where she would stop for fuel and lunch, of the detour she would take to visit the old place. Not, she told herself, to reminisce. She had no use for sentiment or self-indulgent whiffs of nostalgia. The visit was a purely practical one, a yearly tribute. She wanted to know if the house was still standing. What the tenants had done to the place, if the creek still ran where it did, and, yes, she wanted to visit Ruth, check on the tree they had planted on her grave.
The sun crept high above the horizon and blared a pure yellow light. Lexi cracked her window, leant over to the glove compartment, removed her glasses, and shoved them onto her face.
In 1974, when Lexi was nine years old, her beloved stepdad, Frank, pulled into their driveway shifting down gears, and then, before he could put on the handbrake, had a stroke. The car rolled forward and crashed into the garage. From the inside, the roller door looked like a half-opened sardine can. Lexi rushed downstairs and found him, splayed dead across the wheel.
Her mother, coming to inspect the source of the noise, burst through the front door yelling, ‘Frank what on God’s earth have you done now?’ before she too came outside and fell to the ground in horrible shrieks. It was young Alexis who rang the ambulance and calmed her hysterical mother, who allowed her daughter, there on the front lawn, the rare treat of touching her. It was an episode that, once Frank had been declared a body and her mother had collected her nerves, was never to be repeated.
Lexi had loved Frank like a real father. A red, cheerful man, he had married Lexi’s mother when she was still an infant, and if it were not for the fact of her complexion—so different from both her mother’s paleness and Frank’s ruddiness—they might very well have convinced Lexi he was her biological father. As it was, she did not know her real father, and had learnt not to ask.
Then one day little Lexi was going through an old box of things buried in the garage when she found a picture of her young mother and a man together in a wooden kitchen. Her mother was in a silky green dress cut at her thighs—a provocation Lexi had never seen her indulge in—standing sideways and looking slyly at the camera, while a man in a soft-looking white shirt folded to his elbows leant backwards against a countertop, hands resting either side of his hips, a calm, knowing expression on his face. The picture had no date, but Lexi felt sure, given the apparent age of her mother, the slenderness of her hips (which she like to remined Lexi she’d never gotten back after pregnancy), and certainly in the doleful brown eyes and ridged nose of the man, that she was looking at her father. She stole the photo, stored it between the pages of her diary, and looked at it every night. At the time she had thought the man Indian, but with her older mind’s eye, she knew he could be from anywhere in south or west Asia—perhaps even as far west as Greece. It was impossible now, with the corruption of her memory, to tell; one day she had come home from school to find the photo missing. When she ran downstairs to confront her mother about it, she found her in the kitchen brandishing a cold stare. Her mother: ‘What do you want, you little thief?’ And she never saw the picture again.
In the years after Frank died, her mother, who had never been warm, became cruel, as she had been to Frank. Why he had loved her mother at first Lexi had not understood, but with time it was easier to see. Lexi’s mother—with her large sparking green eyes, small heart-shaped face and dark head of hair that came to her forehead in an elegant widow’s peak—resembled Elizabeth Taylor, and had been told as much by most everyone she encountered, from great aunts, to employers, to strangers at restaurants. The effect this had had on her could not be understated or reversed.
So, her mother had been beautiful and Frank rich. Had Lexi been disappointed when she had realised that Frank, a man with a girlish, high laugh and endless affection for Lexi, had suffered from the same affliction as everyone—superficilaity? She knew, too, that her mother could be charming when she wanted to be, and a difficult woman to divorce.
In their large house the estrangement had been easy. Her mother did nothing but browse magazines and sip on chardonnay, always wearing a prim dress, her posture stiff, not a strand of hair wispy.
The day after Frank’s death, Lexi came down the spiralling staircase of the house, descending into the kitchen, from which the surf of St Kilda could be heard smashing into the sand, and asked her mother what was for dinner. Without looking up she had said: ‘What do I look like, the maid?’
So their relationship was set. Something in Frank’s death had shifted the newly minted widow even further away from her daughter, and Lexi, not inclined to seek her mother’s love endlessly, learnt not to stay where she wasn’t wanted.
Growing prematurely into a teenager, Lexi snuck out to loiter on the beach with the other adolescents whose parents were either permissive or negligent, and turned easily to the loose guitars of Steely Dan, the feeling of two tokes of a joint. Whenever her mother did talk to her—to tell her to stop frowning or she’d get wrinkles, or to stop eating or she’d get fat—Lexi would give her a stoned laugh, lock herself in her room, and turn up the record player.
After she came back from the creek—five days absence in total—sticky and covered in a film of dirt, Lexi hoped to grab a shower and sleep before her mother clocked her presence, an easy thing to do in that large house with pipes and bricks that offered footholds on the climb up to her bedroom window. But she never made it to the shower. The first thing she noticed after sliding up her windows was her barren bedroom walls, stripped of posters and polaroids. Then her missing record player. She heaved her mattress off her bed to retrieve her diary but found it gone.
The gas station offered a single stale egg sandwich, and Lexi, sitting on the picnic table in the small area beyond the fuel tank, ate with relish. She leant out of the shade the giant umbrella provided, the branding of the ice tea company it once advertised bleached in the sun, and felt the heat on her face. The earth too was scorched, grass yellow and spiky. With the UV index so high and no forecast of rain, the air should have been crisp and clear, the sky a penetrating azure. But from where she was, at the outpost of a small town, looking to the distant horizon, a light smog had turned the air a milky periwinkle, as if it had taken on a film—a pearlescent membrane over her field of vision. Lexi blinked and bit into her sandwich. The comfort in slightly stale bread—she loved it as much as anything any restaurant in Melbourne could make for her. It lit up those neural pathways of the first few months away from home, when she’d lived off whatever she could scavenge, slip into her bag. Still fourteen, she had spent two weeks with the girl she’d been seeing, whose name had now permanently slipped away in the caverns of her mind, the silty mud of memory washed away in the rain of time. What Lexi did remember though: the way they would roll around on the mattress, the smell of teenage sex, the ignorance of the girl’s parents talking as if they were having a sleep over.
But even they had caught on and Lexi fled again, this time to the inner city. These were in the post-Monkey Grip years, and people were rushing to emulate something that had already been, trying to taste the last part of it—a sensation Lexi would experience for the whole of the ’80s, when she was still coming late to the ’70s, turning up to the party when people were stumbling home in the morning light. So Lexi found a way of living. She was on the street for two weeks—going to marches and parties, bars, the baths and the beach. She soon fell in with group of artists and found a room in the inner north. A room but no job. She turned fifteen but said she was seventeen. This fooled everyone except the girl in the room opposite her, who was actually seventeen, and came in one morning to plonk herself on Lexi’s bed. Marion wore her hair short and spiky, sported shiny translucent tops and short skirts, something easy to do with the tightness of her body. The real seventeen-year-old, Marion, threw Lexi’s wallet down on bed, having filched it the night before. She held Lexi’s ID card in hand.
‘Fucking knew it,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry,’ Marion smiled, ‘I won’t tell anybody.’
Soon they were best friends. It was Marion who saw Lexi stealing chickpeas and beans and taught her which supermarket bins usually had edible food in them. Marion who, when Lexi began to talk about the conservation efforts in America, pointed her toward earth groups—although it bored Marion herself. ‘Fucking hippies,’ Marion would intone, opening the window to smoke in Lexi’s bedroom.
Together they would lie around in the backyard, gossiping, Marion talking about who she was fucking or no longer fucking with and which women hated her although they pretended, in the name of feminism, not to. The older girl wore a rotation of vibrant layers and patterns that she altered, snipped, readjusted in ways that Lexi would soon see their friends scrambling to copy. And then Marion had thrust on Lexi a pair of overalls (‘I just can’t with your fucken bell bottoms, Lex’), which she had not parted with until the end of the millennium.
When there was nothing else to do, Marion would triumphantly pull from her bag her latest stolen record—Bowie, New Order, Blondie, Nick Cave, Siouxsie and the Banshees. She convinced Lexi that the ’80s itself, the time they were living in, had its own flavour. And it was Marion who had introduced her sheepishly to a group of lesbians which Lexi was soon in thrall to.
She drank and went to bands, and Marion’s plays or Ken’s gigs or Eric’s parties—whoever’s whatevers were going on. She got a job with one of the green organisations where she enjoyed a small amount of infamy as ‘the girl from the photo’, and spent time putting up posters around the city to recruit others while out of her mind on mushrooms. She sometimes took, did, smoked, coke, acid, weed. She snorted—but she never shot up—dope. She had seen the cold grey skin of an overdose not six months into her new life and had felt a strong layer of repulsion, the slickness of bile in her stomach.
If Lexi sometimes considered her privileged upbringing, she did not feel guilty about it; it was something she felt she’d willingly forgone.
She moved into a lesbian household and soon become overwhelmed with sexual and romantic triangles. There were certain rules that Lexi had to learn and there were factions too, between the lesbians who presented themselves as womanly, who felt they should reclaim their femininity, and those who felt femininity was performative, and so should be cast off entirely. Both believed themselves to be upholding superior feminist morals, while often dating across party lines. Lexi, knowing herself to be attracted to femininity, shaved off her hair, thinking in false binaries that she must therefore be unfeminine herself. But she came to understand, from how upset she was by her own baldness, from the way she secretly cultivated her appearance, that this was denying her own impulses. By the time Lexi was seventeen she had endured every abrasive relationship dynamic imaginable, and found that they all fell apart in precisely the same way. She had seen a bath of blood when Marion had a miscarriage, and again when another woman water birthed (same tub). She got her heart broken and moved back in with Marion, who did not attempt to hide her despair at Lexi’s growing hippiness. ‘Just don’t get earnest on me, Lex.’ Back with Marion she watched as her friend dyed her hair deep red with henna and wore it in two buns on the side of her head. She witnessed Marion adopt jeans so low her pubic hair curled around their waistband; she saw how every man from Lygon St to the esplanade in St Kilda wanted to sleep with her—and many of them did.
In her backyard, four days after her eighteenth birthday, Lexi lay in the grass, tripping, watching the clouds turn themselves into characters from children’s shows. She was talking idly to Big Bird about a law that had been passed in California that would stop coal mining in a national park. About how the greenhouse effect, the science, was so real even mining magnates couldn’t look away from it. Big Bird nodded, while Marion sat on the bamboo chair hanging from the shade of a giant mulberry tree, not listening. After snorting a little coke, Marion held up the baggy as an offer.
Lexi was about to reach out when a man in a suit came through the side gate. Without the faintest hint of panic, Marion tucked the coke back into her pocket.
‘Alexis Bostic?’
Lying on the grass staring up at the dome of the sky, Lexi saw the man hanging down from the earth, looking as though, if he took a step, he would fall into the sky.
She sat up and spun around to face him. Her hair, cropped short, was matted with leaves.
‘Alexis Bostic?’ He said again.
‘Depends who’s asking,’ Marion said, eyeing him.
‘A word, if you will.’
When Lexi looked up again the clouds had resumed their usual, pillowing shape.
In the car, driving north in the spring of 2019, Lexi turned onto a road that she had driven down many times before. In its familiarity—the green house you could still glimpse down the slaloming driveway, nestled between two oaks, the fence that bowed and broke—she felt a small dawning, like a drop of sweat. Even the horses in the far paddock were the same silky grey she remembered. Uncanny, to come to a place she had not visited in years and find it the same, when she could barely walk through Collingwood without a café going up before her eyes.
Lexi felt a hot gulp of pain. The air was a strange yellow now and there was no denying the smoke on the horizon. The fires had most certainly skipped the border. Lexi was anxious and felt it in the heaviness of the space behind her eyes—she wanted to cross into New South Wales, not to go to the property she had intended to inspect, but merely to meet the fire where it was, to greet the beast.
The man in the suit (‘Who’s the narc?’) turned out to be Frank’s lawyer, informing Lexi she’d just inherited several million dollars. Frank had bequeathed all his money, his old money—oil money—to Lexi, to be transferred to her when she came of age. He had left her mother only the house and enough to live on comfortably. There Lexi had been, thinking her mother had hated her for her sexuality. But she should have known better; her mother didn’t care enough to be bothered by all that.
In the come down the next day, trying to separate the reality from the fiction of the day before, she had thrown caution to the wind and called home.
‘Mum?’
‘So you’re still alive then.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I think it’s you who didn’t tell me something, you little slut.’
Then the phone line went dead. These were the last words her mother spoke to her. It was 1983. When she died from breast cancer, twenty-two years later, Lexi did not attend the funeral.
Heat wobbled in the air coming off the road, and the smell of the distant landscape going up in flames filled the car. Lexi put on the aircon, then she slowed and looked carefully along the stretch of road, until she pulled over and got out under the shade of a pear tree and set about plucking a resistant fruit from its branches. Retreating into the cool of her car, she bit into the gritty skin of the fruit and was met with the chalky tasteless texture of its insides. Too early in the season. The pear looked like a miniature of itself, made for a doll house.
Lexi had not told anyone—not in the six months it took for the paperwork to come through, and not even after she went to the bank and found it was true—that she was rich, obscenely so. And then, eventually, she had told the only person she trusted over a lavish seafood dinner in the city.
Marion widened her eyes and scoffed. ‘Jesus fuck! What are you going to do with it?’
‘I think,’ Lexi said, ‘I’m a bit sick of Melbourne.’ The plan, she told Marion, was to buy a property in Gippsland. To keep a big house where people they knew, people they liked, could come, could live if they wanted. Grow vegetables and keep animals. They would live off the land, live in the way she believed in her bones that they should. She wanted to be in the earth, with the earth and, she shrugged, now she could. Lexi smiled ironically to lessen the blow of her earnestness. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘work is a fucking joke. Full of men. They seem more interested in patting themselves on the back than doing anything useful.’
‘Yeah?’ said Marion. ‘Me too.’
‘What?’
Marion shrugged. ‘I’m a bit sick of the city too. Maybe I’ll come with you.’
‘But Marion—hippies.’
Marion sighed, ‘I know, I know, hippies, but there’s nothing here for me.’ She had recently fallen in love with a man she’d been seeing, broken a strong personal oath. He said he was in love with her too—and two or three other women.
‘And I don’t think,’ Marion added in a small voice, looking down at her plate of crab, ‘that acting is going to work out.’
Lexi gave her a soft compassionate look but said nothing to contradict her; it was not in her nature to patronise for a preserved ego.
It was decided, Marion would come with her, and together they started the commune. Just before Lexi’s twentieth birthday, they moved into a sprawling green house at the base of the mountain, with a creek flowing out the back of the property. Three others from the city joined them. There was Ulla and Caleb, a couple whose foreplay involved reading troublingly loud verse to each other. Lexi had been unsure about letting a man into the place, felt that it would undermine the feminist utopia she’d envisioned. Marion, with her own motives, had been the one to persuade her of her closemindedness. Lexi was swiftly vindicated: Caleb began walking around the house naked, saying, as his engorged penis proceeded him through doorways, ‘It’s my rod of enlightenment.’ Ulla, with her tarot cards and treatises on the power of the womb, the moon, and mother nature, almost made up for him. Then there was Natalie, a solid, kind lesbian who Lexi had miraculously not slept with—although they shared an ex—and who spent her nights out on the property, hunched over a telescope staring at the stars. It was Natalie who convinced Caleb to wear underwear, at least when he was sporting an erection. She managed this without yelling.
Together, they planted a large garden, rescued chickens, a goat they called Billy.
In the spring and summer, the garden came up and sun shone throughout the valley for incredible lengths of the day. In the heat, there would be an influx of people from the city, who would fill the house to bursting, some sleeping outside on the cool earth, to be sardined into the living room only on rainy nights. The garden would be tended, chickens fed and chased, goats milked, and the creek filled with bodies basking in the clear cool waters all day long. Children with brown limbs and sun-kissed hair ran around as free-range as the chickens, plucking skinny beetles from the damp, mossy armpits of trees and shrubs. The children slept in a heap in a room with three mattresses. It was impossible to tell who belonged to who.
Some friends came when they needed a break, for a self-imposed rehab from drugs or love, space from the rapidly changing city. Ulla and Caleb slept with other people and each other and together with other people and pretended that this did not upset them, while talking endlessly of managing jealousy as if it were a feral dog they were trying to housetrain. Natalie found a local lover in Greta, an older woman who knitted jumpers for everyone and played mum.
The lifestyle grew on Marion, and although she maintained her fashionable ways—improvising a top out of safety pins and torn stockings, finding old hats and scarfs at antique stores, smearing brown lipstick on as eye shadow—and could not stand the long-haired music favoured by most who came through, or many of the long-haired people themselves, she nevertheless took to gardening with vigour and spent most evenings walking in the rainforest, or taking Billy to stroll along the rocky road.
And for years, Lexi had lived like this, content. How healthy she felt in possession of herself, knowing that this was how she was meant to live. How humans were meant to live. The ups and downs of life had levelled out, the oscillating dramas smoothed to a steady, unerring line. She was content but, perhaps, not happy.
At the end of their third summer at The Homestead—named by Natalie with, Lexi felt, a touch too much sincerity—the two people that would change this rolled up together, crunching over gravel in a yellow corolla to find an unusually quiet house. Caleb—after another fleeting commitment to monogamy—had pressed himself on an interloper, and Ulla had then flown off with the other visitors like a pack of cockatoos when the summer had dissipated. After a week of weeping, Caleb had followed to find Ulla and continue their terrible dance.
The sun was in the heat of mid-afternoon. Lexi was lounging in a hammock strung under the shade of two mulberry trees when they approached. Ted knew Natalie, had heard of the commune on the base of the escarpment, and wanted to escape to the country where he would not be bothered by the daily life of the city, and the people in it. It was on his way, in the depths of rural New South Wales on a winding dirt road, that he had found Ruth holding out her thumb like a desperate gift. He would tell Lexi later that he had almost passed her, thinking she was heading toward Sydney, but as her figure had appeared in his rearview mirror, he had caught her looking back, and the expression on her face had reminded him of his youngest sister. So, the story went, he had stopped. And Ruth, who had no place to go other than away from her father, had become convinced, over the course of the drive to The Homestead, that God had intended her find this place.
Ted put on the handbrake and unfolded his tall body out of the car, hairy legs protruding from shorts, raising a hand to Lexi. He took off his round spectacles and cleaned them on the bottom of his shirt. Lexi, wiping the gunk from her eyes and stretching from her lazy afternoon, walked over to greet him, and there, asleep in the passenger seat was Ruth. A fringe cut straight across her long, freckled face, which was closed perfectly in rest, the premature wrinkles at her eyes relaxed, as if ironed flat. An expression more suited to the dead than the dreaming. It was this face that Lexi would think of five years later.
Ted was talking, but Lexi did not hear him. She understood, then, that the forming of continents, the earth moving for billions of years, volcanic ash spewing, cavities of soft coal collapsing to let in lakes and seas, the slow ambling of a planet—all of it had really been the earth rushing her forward to this point, and felt as if her feet had melted into the ground.
Ted and Marion fell in love. Lexi watched them pretending to hate each other. Ted lounging in shade, reading an impossible number of history books in his green ruggers. Marion smoking, altering clothes. ‘You’re so boring!’;‘It’s not my job to entertain you.’ The way they looked at each other across the room when they had a party, the bickering while they prepared a meal. ‘It doesn’t need to look pretty.’ The night they disappeared early into the paddock and the silent way Ted moved his stuff into Marion’s room and then didn’t leave at the end of summer as he had planned, to go back into the city and finish his doctorate, but stayed and lived with them. On academia: ‘It can wait.’
For Lexi and Ruth it took longer—the earth had been working so long for this moment and Lexi had no urge to rush it, content to work in step with the ancient grumblings.
Here was the driveway: just the same. Hidden behind a formidable gum tree, the road curving through trees. Lexi’s modern car felt wrong here, like she’d gone back in time. Hard not to think of herself like a warning from the future—a bringer of end times. Had she not been treated like that, over the course of her career? Like a loon with a sign around her neck, histrionically ringing a bell, and not what she was, a rational reader of science—someone who listened to nature, saw the signs and took heed. Whatever people said about her, she was not hysterical. For her, the emotion of the crisis had been weeded out long ago, had shifted from her when she left this place.
Emotions, or so thought Lexi now, were superfluous to the problem. It was fact, solid fact, that the way humanity went about living was incompatible with the continuation of the species, with the biodiversity of the earth they lived on. Had been untenable since man raised his first weapon, struck open earth, took from below to build upward, outward, thinking nature was something that could be conquered and used in the ceaseless pursuit of expansion, a never-ending resource that would replenish to fill their need. No. What was happening was no surprise—the science had been around since the ’70s. Governments had been warned about the greenhouse effect, melting permafrost, the heating ocean, the trees being felled, tipping points that would make all these things worse, triggering yet more tipping points. They had been told. And nothing had changed. No one had listened. They had seen the insects die off, birds fall from the sky, fish disappear from the ocean—auguries as if from the bible itself—and done nothing. Now cyclones multiplied in tropical seas, high temperature records were broken again and again, weather events that should have taken on the mystique of legend had become commonplace. People adjusted to the new normal with spinetingling speed. There would be a time, Lexi was certain, in the near future, when people would crawl onto a roof to avoid a flood, flee to the ocean to avoid fire, with the attitude of someone bored with the tediousness of it all. Already people baked themselves in the sun on oil-soaked beaches, rejoiced in the heat of rapidly tropicalising coasts as if it were a blessing. All these things would happen quicker than anyone could imagine. Were already happening. Humans had used technology to adapt in a way that was unnatural, and they would die thinking they could outrun the organic fact of their own bodies.
Man still wanted to wrestle with nature, unaware they were merely holding down one of her small limbs, while she looked down upon them, amused.
And those who did listen? They often let the whispers of the earth drive them to self-destruction—or hopeless despair. For Lexi there was no way forward but to watch the horrific events transpire as they had been predicted to. Bleaching coral, drier landscapes, fire seasons that started earlier and went for longer.
Lexi parked, took a breath in and out, then got out of the car. She could not approach this place in a vehicle. Sweat broke out almost immediately in the stifling heat. Was the tension in her just the anger she had worked herself into, or did it come from moving through the air, dense as wool? Above her the sky was covered with a pillowing grey that did not look like any cloud Lexi had seen before. Her skin already felt grimy.
Lexi did not take the left track which wound away to the house. She could see from where she stood a hammock, hanging as one always had under the mulberry trees, where if you napped in the mid-summer dark fruit would fall and stain your clothes like blood. Instead she took the right path, passing the garden where the purple blossom of wild asparagus had gone to seed, overtaken. Tomatoes wilted orange and green in the heat.
The sound of water sighing over rocks beckoned and Lexi moved toward it. No birds called. This was the path that she and Ruth had taken many times before, barefoot on the grass, on their way to the creek where, in the cool water, they would soak themselves in the afternoon, washing off the day’s work and emotions. It was here that Lexi had learnt to let out her anger in the body of water. It was here in the fresh green that they had come to know each other.
Ruth told Lexi she felt more comfortable in the creek, citing her daily swims in the river that cut through the property she’d grown up on—a house she said, not so different from the one they’d made their own. She talked about how the water was the only place she’d felt a little peace, where she could escape the unfounded rage of her father.
It was in the creek that Lexi had brought her wet lips to Ruth’s. It was there, with the breeze disturbing the fingers of the gum trees in an almighty rustle, that Lexi came to understand how Ruth wielded her long limbs.
Standing now at the slimy rocks that led down to the water, Lexi did not feel the rush of emotion, or remember the surprising, soft touch of Ruth’s slim back. She did not think either, that this was the place where Ruth had been pulled from the water, or about how Ted, who’d dragged her limp body from the rocks, refused to return to this place, and how over the years her refusal to sell the property had become the one splinter in their friendship, the one thing that would reliably, when pushed, open the wound further, and so was tactically avoided. Lexi did not think of the reasons why she could not move back to the property, and yet refused to sell it. She thought instead that she had never seen the bed run so dry, the flow she had heard earlier presenting itself as no more than a small if persistent leak.
Lexi took off her shoes and walked into the creek, moving up along the rocks. It was here that they had conceived of the organisation, and it was for this that Lexi chose to remember the place. For the good they decided they would, could enact. At the end of the ’80s, it felt like they could do anything. The politics was aligned, the science was unquestionable. It did not occur to either of them, to any of them, to anyone except, perhaps, the neoliberals in suits on the other side of the earth, that things would not work out the way they wanted. That they would overthrow the dominant ideologies of capitalism and end the ceaseless pillaging and conquering of the world was not even a question. That they had found another way to live was undoubtable, and in this bubble it became impossible to think otherwise—they conceived of society already in the depth of change. This was a time when aerosols had been banned, the hole in the ozone had begun to close. They thought it was a revelatory, a deep and unspeakable shift in the way of being in the world. They dreamt up a way of saving earth, of conserving natural places, of caring for animals, equal rights from the ground up—for liberation for the earth started with the liberation of the oppressed. They had dreamed up a new utopia. And for Lexi and Ruth and many women like them at the cusp of the nineties, the oppression of women and the oppression of earth were inextricably linked. They would start it right there in the house. Take in new animals and new people, they would forge another path.
But these dreams were just that—dreams.
Ruth’s spirit could not be contained by the work—the actual, practical work that needed to be done pained her. When Lexi would find her in her room she would groan and curl up to face the crucifix that hung beside her bed. Along with the religion it represented, the crucifix was the only thing Ruth had taken from her childhood home. While others of their pack took on the teachings of Buddha, quoted the Tao Ti Ching, and even Ruth herself often followed Natalie’s gaze and looked up to the stars for answers, Lexi had caught her more than once, hands clasped in prayer, bent over her bed as if she had fallen to her knees.
In the creek, Lexi climbed over rocks and came at last to the place she remembered, and although it seemed much smaller now—the creek bed largely bereft of water, the roots of a scribbly gum exposed where the dirt around them had been eroded—the past strength of the stream still haunted the earth. Lexi stripped off her dress and waded into the warm water, taking a large breath, dipping her head beneath the surface, taking the taste of slime and mud in her mouth, and letting it fall from her as she breached the surface. As always the water shifted something from her.
It was 1989 when Lexi started what would one day be the organisation. TIME magazine’s person of the year was Earth—that fragile endangered planet they all lived on—and it was with this assurance of the planet’s importance, this feeling that things had to be done but, importantly, could be done, that Lexi began to put things in order.
It was also true that this sense of purpose came to Lexi during the months that Ruth was pulling away from her, a move that felt to Lexi as devastating as if the moon had turned her back on the earth. So it was also in desperation that Lexi convinced herself this doing of the things they had dreamed up together would bring them closer, that Ruth would warm to her again, come to see that the things they talked of could be done. But as Lexi’s work eclipsed everything else in her life, Ruth become more drawn into herself. She became, in the first years of the nineties, very quickly overwhelmed by the work needed to enact deep change, and just as quickly wilted in despair.
Ruth had found a much easier way of being in touch with the earth—being stoned out of her mind—and was soon making a trip a week to her weed dealer, spending her time around the house in the hammock, in the water, or simply wandering around, some distant look in her eyes. She disappeared for hours during the day and hardly ate. Lexi did not understand that in making their desires reality, she had taken away what Ruth felt to be the magical quality of them, and this was responsible for the wall between them that no could no longer be breached. The more distance grew between Ruth and Lexi, the closer Ruth drew to the near-strangers who visited the house, giving herself over to them, like a vessel. She was not faithful, and Lexi knew it. She tried to be bothered with it, found, when she reached into the bottom of her heart, that it had nothing to do with her, and could not bring herself to anger.
So Lexi threw herself further into her work. Ruth became more overwhelmed by Lexi’s energy. To give her space, Lexi enrolled in university back in the city, took classes in politics and the history of science, renting a small apartment, and returning to The Homestead only on the weekends. In her absence, Natalie, Ted and Marion unsuccessfully attempted to improve the persistent gloom that walked around in the shape of Ruth, who wept for days on end at the suggestion that she should go home, at misguided attempts to cheer her.
It was the only time in Lexi’s life since she’d met Marion that their relationship became strained. Marion thought her no better than her mother, pulling away like that, and she would barely speak to Lexi when she did come home, which became more and more infrequent. Ted’s kindness was above this and during these months it was he that Lexi became close with. One evening, before Lexi had come back into the house from the city, he came out to the car and shut himself into the passenger seat while Lexi was still collecting her belongings.
‘She’s not well, Lex. She spends all her time sulking in the creek and she never eats. She needs to go home, but she doesn’t want to go home, and she doesn’t want to stay, she’s miserable and we’re miserable with her.’
Look at this. This is your mess too.
It was true that Lexi had noticed how Ruth’s hands bore the wrinkles from her hours in the creek. As if she were trying to become amphibious or, like the ancestors of whales, move permanently back into the water. It was hard not to notice that Ruth did not seem to look at her properly, didn’t ever appear to listen, had put the thing of herself on a thread and thrown it out into the cosmos, unable to be tethered.
Lexi pulled herself out of the creek, her skin drying swiftly in the incredible heat. She would go and talk to her tenants soon, then she would leave to look at the potential property, an hour or so away, then she would set off to try her luck in the mountains. But first she wanted to see Ruth.
A memory of one of the last evenings she had spent with Ruth came to her. It was not one she had dwelled on in the years after Ruth’s death, but something that had eroded with time, awakened only by scent. She’d first remembered it when Sidney had come home one evening, smelling like a man. Looking guilty and keeping her distance, she took a long steaming shower. Did Sidney think she had fooled her? Had she not seen in Lexi’s amused face that she knew exactly what had happened, had smelled a man on her, as she had smelled a man on Ruth the last evening she had come home before they buried her ashes. Lexi did not remember the name of this man; he had come and left with the breeze of summer. But she did remember, yes, she was sure now, his smell, that faint rancid tang. And she had not minded, she had never minded. She did not ever, so she told herself, want to be an oppressor or a controller, envisioning herself instead as an anchor, the point of stability for Ruth and the women like her—Frieda and Sang, and later, Sidney. These lost women who didn’t know how to stop orbiting around the malicious things that came into their paths. Lexi attracted these women like a magnet but had not stopped to consider if she herself might be one of the great forces that so disrupted their lives.
When Sidney began to sleep around Lexi felt only a sad fondness for her—she reminded her so much of Ruth, not just because of her age, or the freckled face, the delicate fair skin already wrinkled at the corner of her eyes and mouth. Lexi was aware that her own inclination for younger women had been set in stone the moment Ruth stopped at the age of twenty-four, and she was aware, moreover, that the tendency of these relationships to dissolve before her paramours hit thirty was almost certainly related. But it was also true that she chose not to think on this too deeply. Lexi was always, in courtship, the approached and never the approacher. That a Venus flytrap was its own sort of predator had not occurred to her.
It was not long after Sidney’s excursions to other people’s beds had become apparent that Lexi had asked her to join her at a gala dinner. A decent meal for the price of listening to the inane chatter of men in tight fitting checked shirts tell her about how they were going to save the world. How they—having invariably started caring about climate change in the preceding eighteen months following some encounter with a suffocated turtle, or after reading an article about the threats faced by the blue-footed booby—knew just exactly what had to be done, without ever sacrificing their own goals: making more money.
Sidney sat listening, upright, attentive as she smiled at the men with money—enough money to make Lexi’s fortune look quaint—as they talked of carbon capture techniques, of the machines that would save them. The one in charge, gluttonously eating octopus, napkin tucked into his shirt collar like a bib, was particularity interested, he said, in an invention that would replicate a volcano. Sidney was amazed, but Lexi had heard it all before.
Here was man, the same as always, thinking he could bend the earth to his will. The machine: an invention that would spray enough particles into the air to turn the sky white and protect the earth from warming for just that little bit longer. Sidney had told the man that it sounded incredible, while Lexi, skewering her broccoli, had replied that she didn’t know what was more incredible: how quickly the flora and fauna would die out once the paleness of their sci-fi sky had faded and global warming was let out in full force, or their own stupidity.
These men did not seem to care about the weather events a simulated volcano would cause in far off places, nor the fact that while historically a large eruption had cooled the earth, it had also, without fail, brought on a mass extinction. They thought themselves immune to death, brushed off her rudeness with a laugh, and talked of their bunkers in New Zealand.
A machine that was meant to aid the future would obscure the stars—constellations that people, since the dawn of time, had consulted for signs of what was to come, maps of the future. It was so obviously insidious as to take on the consistency of a parable, and Lexi, in the detached way she had to in order to avoid an outburst, told Sidney just this on the way home.
Thus began the cooling of that relationship.
The earth was hot on Lexi’s feet. She stepped on a large pebble and something in her hip twinged. Was she surprised, then, on that day when she had gone back to her lone flat, exhausted from university and the discussions that had gone on the lawn well after classes had ended? Was she shocked by the phone ringing, waking up fully clothed on the couch, Ted’s frantic voice? It felt like someone had come up to her silently from behind and kicked in her knees. It left her winded, confused, thinking only, as she told Ted she’d be there as soon as possible, that she desperately needed to pee. Lexi hung up and relieved herself, and when she flushed the toilet, found something had poured out of her permanently through her bladder.
The drowning was officially accidental; Ruth was stoned and tired and had gone swimming by herself, late at night. But the type of mourning they undertook could not be mistaken in tone. They had not been able to get onto her parents in time for the funeral they held on the property, near the creek where they buried her ashes, planting a single blue gum on her burial spot.
When at last they did reach her family, Lexi spoke on the phone to her father. Despite what she had heard of the man, she invited him to the property, giving him the address so that the family could visit the place where Ruth’s ashes were buried. He hung up without saying anything. A day later she saw a truck rolling down to the creek. A thin, short man with an amber head of hair let himself out of the truck and walked along the creek until he found her crucifix planted in the soil, where he lowered himself to supplication and stayed there until darkness of the evening swallowed him. In the early hours of the morning, Lexi heard the start of an engine, the movement of wheels, and never saw or heard from him again.
Along the rows of trees, Lexi wondered if she would be able to decipher which one signalled the grave, when she came to a corner and stopped short. Before her was a blue gum, and in the twist of its two elbowed arms, in the way it held its itself—it was like looking up at Ruth’s body.
Here it is again: fire. Fire is the smog that settles on the horizon and stays there for days, weeks, long enough to be accepted as clouds. It is the skeleton of houses and trees covering swathes of land so vast they cannot be reckoned with. Fire is the hollow feeling in a chest, grief and relief in equal measure. It is the spark between two lovers, and it is quick burn out. It is a heat unimagined, compressing your every pore, stealing your breath, making all things shimmer in black, red, orange—shades of crimson and amber. It is the skin of an animal peeling off, its pungent singe, the thump of exhausted birds falling from the sky, a fallen rainbow of lorikeets, it is the last exhalation of a thousand, a million, a billion species, the death of a landscape. Fire is burning its way up the mountain, jumping over obstacles, sheer rock faces thought insurmountable, burning right up to the shoreline, crossing borders and rivers, and hope. Fire is growing, folding back onto itself, an impenetrable wall of red and black, swirling taller and brighter into some horrendous monster, brewing its own storm cloud, opening the maw of hell. It is the cloud of ash crackling, bringing not rain, but lightning bolts reaching down, starting another spark. Fire is the horizon smoking; the moon, in the sky like a beacon, red—not an omen of what’s to come, but a sign it’s already here.
Tasmania had even more green to offer her, a cornucopia of verdancy glowing as the sun rose over the horizon. Sitting on the balcony in the small shack on the outskirts of Hobart, Lexi admired the slime trails snails had left, drawn across the wood in rivers. In the yard, between tall ancient trees and the constant shrills of insects and squawks of parrots nattering, spider webs glistened in dew.
Dawn, the day before New Year’s Eve, 2019. It was summer. It was also Tasmania. So while Lexi had packed a wool cardigan suited for the Melbourne autumn, it lay slung over the deck chair opposite her, the heat already rising with the day.
A stone bird bath, rimmed in the green moss of stagnate water sat in the garden before her. A swift parrot, as if summoned by her gaze, flew down to it and began at once to bathe, making quick dives to wet himself, before perching on the edge to fuss at his wings. Beak turned away from her, his glassy eye caught the movement of her taking a sip of coffee and he froze, appraising her. But this lasted only a moment. He evidently found she was what she looked like—a harmless old woman—and went about his business.
Here she was alone, in the lush expanse of Tasmania. Two months before, in Gippsland, after the shock of the tree, she had caught herself being ridiculous, got in the car and fled. Lexi could not believe she had thought she would go up there simply to witness the fires, and she understood now that the danger of the fires had eluded her. The thought of real catastrophe, tangible, watchable, unbearable. An abstraction: something she was no more able to grasp than one is able to comprehend a historical account of an island, sinking.
Worse, she had thought the fires as an inconvenience; an obstacle that could be avoided tactically while she asked over acreage and tank size, thinking herself uniquely immune. She was—it came to her in a sudden blaze, the way fire swept over dry grass—no better than the men and their bunkers.
So be it.
Tasmania felt not so much like venturing to an island as stepping foot onto another planet.
A fitting way to start her new life, if she had not quite started it yet. This being more of a preliminary visit, a scoping, a holiday. She was staying at B&Bs here and there, driving round the island and just, well, looking. Lexi felt fresh and happy and, God, young. She had forgotten the long stubborn whisker she’d plucked from her chin that morning. Her on-going hip pain had slipped from her mind. She was free and she felt it. She could, she knew, leave the property in the charge of some estate agent, and never have to deal with it again, if she so chose. Lexi felt she had started a new chapter, and this was what she wanted to focus on.
Lexi felt, above all, relief.
She could not remember a time when she had planned to spend the new year by herself. Marion’s annual cocktail party—once a joyous occasion—had, after years of obligatory attendance, turned tedious. To go now, after everything, seemed especially egregious. In the prospect of seeing in the new year by herself, she found she felt not only relieved but something unfamiliar, something she had become unacquainted with. Not quite excitement—that emotion, having been, like many things reserved for the young, weeded out in time, replaced with the shell of experience. But Lexi could not deny that she looked forward to the last days of the year, the idea that she might enjoy herself, here, watching the birds bathe and not thinking about the mainland, raging in flames, a ravaged property—a ravaged county. Not thinking much at all. Something unnatural happened to her—a smile. Something she had not managed more than sardonically in two years. She felt as if she were defrosting, felt warm and pleasant, and this almost made her laugh. She was—she realised—happy. And so she sat there smiling, downright grinning to herself as she looked out over the landscape, at the thought of driving around Tasmania. Perhaps in her travels she would catch a glimpse of the place she would settle in for the rest of her years, unwittingly stop through the town that would in the future become familiar to her, as one day smiling might again be. On New Year’s Eve, Lexi decided, she would celebrate with a glass of expensive Tasmanian whiskey then fold herself into bed at nine thirty with a book. Although this last thought, which reached out to flick on the light of Marion’s unimpressed face in her mind, stopped her smiling.
Ted at least had understood her decision. A surprising gossip, as Lexi had found all cultured older men to be, he knew, or had reasonable evidence to believe, that some among their acquaintance would be cold or belittling or downright rude, and he had supported Lexi on her previous campaigns to Skip The Party. But Marion was not pliant or compromising. Ted understood why, Marion didn’t. More truthfully, Marion had never had to understand these things, her beauty and tenacity, and perhaps narcissism, having armed her with a slick duck-coat that repelled the words of others.
Yes, having been compelled in her lifetime through her quickly changing moods to say many things she would not stand by, Marion had built up a strange sort of empathy, based on the working theory that anyone who was cruel was simply having a bad day. Had Marion ever been put in Lexi’s shoes, she would—under the sudden understanding that the bad opinions of others, multiplied and unyielding, have concrete consequences on one’s well-being—have suffered a nervous breakdown as immediate as cold glass cracking under hot water. But as it was Marion had not been and never would be put in a position like Lexi’s, and so no amount of explanation could make her understand the power of words and looks and small implications, and how these things can compress with density, and begin to roll. It evaded her. She certainly did not understand how someone as staunch as Lexi—Lexi, who had never given two shits about this genre of crap—had allowed herself to be affected by it. Was this the same Lexi, Marion wanted to know, who had once on national television, been called hysterical by Australia’s premier radio shock jock, and laughed?
Lexi remembered this. Four years ago: the way Lambert kept a straight face in apparent ignorance, while the cameras and audience and host looked at her, how she had caught in his weaselly little eyes the spark of victory—he’d known full well the implications of his chosen words. It was the perennial mistake of her peers to think the enemy stupid. But Lexi had merely laughed, then pointed out that she was not the one who flew into illogical rants on national radio on the daily.
Unbelievable, that less than a year later she’d been publicly accused of siding with him; the way things were flattened, history forgotten. Exhausting, just to think about it.
‘Where is that Lexi?’ Marion would ask, ‘I’d like her back, please.’
Yes, Lexi had thought, I wouldn’t mind her prompt return either.
But Lexi thought, who was the one preventing her return? Wasn’t it always the case, when she found herself locked in some perceived prison, moaning, that she’d been the one to lock the door? The keys, of course, were already in her pocket. And here Lexi rediscovered another thing about herself and laughed: she truly did not give a shit.
Lightning splintered across the sky as Lexi made the journey northwest to her next destination. Although with no rain falling, and the visor of her rental down, Lexi did not see it at first. It took the hard black shell of her suitcase on the passenger seat reflecting the light of the celestial arrow for her to bend over her wheel, look up into the sky, and witness another bolt crashing down into the horizon, this time the rumbling crack of thunder following four seconds after, coming closer. But still no patter of droplets, no airborne waterfall in the distance cascading from the clouds, which hung bruised purple and red in the distance. Strange weather.
Reception was hard to come by in these parts of the island, another thing that Lexi was grateful for. Lexi thought with glee of this sort of isolation. Looked forward to a place where she’d need a landline for consistent communication, have to walk up hill to find bars to use her mobile. She was winding through the vast interior of Tasmania—so different from the vegetation she recognised, so distant, she felt, it truly was its own county. Here she could finally be with the things that mattered, be present. All else was noise. Distraction from what was important. And what was important to her, what would become important, could be shrunk, smaller and smaller to something she could manage, something she could control, something the size of a property, a house, a hot cup of tea. And the things she could not control—that she had tried to wrangle with her entire life—these things she would let go of.
Perhaps it was true that she was no better than the men she despised, looking for their piece of paradise, somewhere to live comfortably while the world quite literally went up in flames. This was surely better than what she had been doing before, fighting for something that perhaps could no longer be fought for. Foolish. She understood now that she had been like those lost souls who spent their time scouring the Tasmanian wilderness for the tiger. Seeing in the blurred footage of a cat, reminiscence of their famous proud posture, in the walk of a wallaby their awkward back legs. The men who spent all their time and resources looking, so certain that there was something to find.
Lexi thought then that there were no more mysteries in her life; she had never been curious about her real father. Her mother had barely tolerated her—and she had been the one to stay. So why on earth would she go looking for someone who didn’t want her? No. There was nothing left that Lexi felt compelled to uncover. But this was not, as she was about to realise, entirely true. It was then that lightning came down again, appearing like a crucifix, and she gasped. A numbness spread from her fingers up to her brain. For the image of the man in the ute, entering her property to grieve his daughter, his golden-brown head of hair, the crucifix atop Ruth’s bed, and the evangelical overtones of the letters that had been following her since the ’90s, had, at last, connected.
The letters had been penned with—she saw it now—a personal vendetta. How had she not seen this? Perhaps she had been destined to first watch her career fall apart at the hands of an ex-employee. Perhaps she had to learn that righteous vitriol was always personal.
Another bolt of lightning let itself down from the sky, touching incredibly onto a tree and releasing from it a crack that resounded over the landscape. Lexi gasped again, and when she came to the crest of a slight hill, pulled over to a rocky clearing and let herself out of the car.
Down below her, where the lighting had stuck, a hot orange burnt from the top of the singed tree. Leaves smoked then glowed a bright red. The fire—she could hear it crackling—sprinted across the canopy. Before her, the valley resembled, more than anything, a bed of coals. Smoke plumed from the trees. The sky turned black and encompassing. Lexi felt a pressure on her knees and looked down, surprised to find she was kneeling on the jagged edge of rocks. Some great scab, jostled loose in the months she’d spent reflecting on Frank, reflecting on Ruth, unpicked itself, and the water in her unfroze, begun to well and boil. Lexi looked up over the horizon, into the fire, into the great dark face of the beast, and wondered how anyone ever believed themselves capable of conquering it.